European Court of Justice, American Express Co. v The Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, Case C-304/16, 7 February 2018, ECLI:EU:C:2018:66

In 2015, the EU Interchange Fee Regulation [1] (the “IFR”) introduced price caps on the interchange fees paid between banks for processing credit and debit card payments. These fee caps attempt to address concerns identified in a series of antitrust investigations into Visa and Mastercard through price regulation rather than antitrust enforcement. The application of these caps (and a panoply of ancillary rules) has raised significant questions for companies offering payment services, as well as for national regulators charged with enforcing the rules. One of those questions – the application of the rules to smaller three-party schemes, which are exempt from many of the IFR provisions and are only brought into scope in certain specified circumstances – was referred to the Court of Justice